“Lindstrom should be hired by The Economist”
– The Economist
A humorous yet practical five-step guide to ridding ourselves—and our companies—of the bureaucratic bottlenecks and red tape that plague every office.
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Praise
Essential reading for all of us who feel bogged down in workplace bureaucracy and wish to improve our quality of life at work.
Arianna Huffington Founder & CEO
A must-read for anyone wishing to introduce more common sense practices and greater empathy in their workplace.
Keith Ferrazzi Founder and Chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight
Martin’s latest book is fun, fast-paced, and as actionable as it is insightful. Get ready to find out all the ways your organization can gain from better common sense. Highly recommended.
Renée Mauborgne INSEAD Professor and co-author of global bestsellers Blue Ocean Strategy and Blue Ocean Shift
If you are looking for a straight line to customer loyalty and financial success, check out The Ministry of Common Sense. It’s a brilliant reminder that bringing humanity back to business just makes sense.
Liz Wiseman New York Times bestselling author of Multipliers and Rookie Smarts
You will laugh, you will cry, and you will learn the power of common sense in this incredible gift of a book. Oh, and buy one for your boss too.
Chester Elton Best-selling author of The Carrot Principle
Martin Lindstrom’s “common sense” approach is wise, humorous, and fundamentally practical. The book offers a path forward for engaging your employees in fixing broken systems to make work better and customers happier.
Amy C. Edmondson Professor
Lindstrom proves that, more often than not, the bigger your policy manual the smaller you organization’s common sense. More importantly, he shows leaders at all levels how to reverse that alarming trend.
David Burkus author of UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT
The Ministry of Common Sense forces us all to take a hard look in the mirror if we want to take our businesses to the next level to win big – and do so by simply eliminating needless layers of corporate BRIGHT RED tape. Thanks for this book, Martin because you have saved me from senseless meetings!
Tyra Banks Supermodel turned Super Businesswoman
This gem is filled with useful (and fun) tips and tools that will help leaders build teams and organisations where common sense is the rule rather than the exception.
Robert Sutton Stanford Professor and author of bestseller The No Asshole Rule
As a business and culture transformation expert, Martin doesn’t just chop off branches and leaves.He goes deep inside organizations to target the roots of inefficiency, impracticality, and general boneheadedness.
Marshall Goldsmith America's #1 Leadership Coach
Bloated PowerPoints and endless meetings are just a few of the corporate practices that bog down the workplace in bureaucracy. The result is low morale, squandered productivity and poor decision-making. Thankfully, Martin Lindstrom offers specific solutions to restore common sense to organizations that sabotage their own success.
Carmine Gallo communication advisor and bestselling author
A good-humored take on a serious subject–we are taking a daily bath in bureaucratic self sabotage. Plain-spoken and practical; a fun way to learn how to restore common sense to your organization.
Whitney Johnson award-winning author of Disrupt Yourself and Build an A Team
The Ministry of Common Sense
is here!
How come every Zoom call lasts exactly 1 hour no matter how mundane the call is? And why did all the toilet-breaks disappear as Zoom became everyday work life in our bedrooms?
Why has a simple action like buying office equipment turned into a 6-people-committee decision followed by a 5-level approval process?
When a 264 page PPT deck kicks off with “Welcome to the Christmas Party Planning Meeting”… it’s time to call the Ministry of Common Sense – to put an end to it once and for all! It’s time to get rid of the wasted time red tape, to remove the silly rules and recover common sense to serve our customers better.
Laser-beam insightful, side-splittingly funny and packed with solutions, The Ministry Of Common Sense will show you how to transform your company. When you’ve stopped crying with laughter, that is….
Yes? Read on.
WANT TO PUT AN END TO RED TAPE, BUREAUCRACY AND CORPORATE BS?
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Martin Lindstrom’s delightful romp shows how too many organizations seemed designed to drive their customers and employees crazy. And this gem is filled with useful (and fun) tips and tools that will help leaders build teams and organizations where common sense is the rule rather than the exception.
- Robert Sutton, Stanford Professor and author of No Asshole Rule
COMMON SENSE IS MISSING EVERYWHERE
“HOW THE heck AM I SUPPOSED TO OPEN THIS???”
No scissors. No knife. No fingernails. No teeth. I’m about to be at 30,000 feet with no way to open and remove my new headphones from its heavy plastic package.
There I was with my new $400 headphones mocking me through a hard plastic bubble, daring me to attempt prizing it open. I took the challenge, hoping for an easy victory as my flight had already been called and time was running out. An epic common sense fail! Read how this journey into the bizarre world of nonsensical packaging ended…
HOW BIG IS YOUR DECK?
Your office legend may brag about having the biggest powerpoint deck, but can he deliver? You try to reserve a conference room via your company’s new-and-improved computer service, only to find that every conference room is booked…forever. Sounds like a normal day at work? Looks like you need to call in the Ministry.
Thanks for this book, Martin, because you have saved me from senseless meetings!
- Tyra Banks, Supermodel turned Super Businesswoman
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE BOOK
- TRUE STORIES. It happens more than you think. Martin shares humorous stories from companies around the world who suffer the bureaucratic bottlenecks and red tape that plague every office to the detriment of the customer. Prepare to laugh and then get serious.
- PURPOSE. Companies have become so entangled in their own internal issues, and further beset by reams of invisible red tape, that they’ve lost sight of their core purpose. This book reveals how they pay the price and shows the path back to purpose.
- SOLUTIONS. The Ministry of Common Sense is all about forcing stumbling organisations (and some of the world’s biggest appear in the book) to revisit the ever lost common sense
- TRANSFORMATION & INNOVATION. Shows you how to instantly remove unproductive BS, unblock innovation, and create an amazing culture. Ultimately reinstalling common sense.
WANT TO PUT AN END TO RED TAPE, BUREAUCRACY AND CORPORATE BS?
ORDER YOUR BOOK TODAY
ORDER NOW
About Martin Lindstrom
He is the author of several New York Times bestselling books that have sold millions of copies and been translated into 60 languages. Recognized as one of the world’s most influential people (TIME magazine) and in 2020 was named the #18 management thinker in world (Thinkers50).
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The Ministry of Common Sense shows you how to restore common sense, and enjoy the benefits that come with it! (and we mean real company benefits).
What you’re about to read isn’t just sporadic ideas but solutions tried and tested among hundreds of businesses over the past decade. And shown to work.
And yes – there are indeed real Ministries – set up within companies – with the sole purpose of vacuum cleaning all the useless rules, regulations and day-to-day trivialities we all can live without.
The more organizations scale and get stale, the more employees become victims of standardized rules, procedures and old habits that have never been questioned for logic. Once we’ve learned to become corporate, we suppress our instinctual empathy and ignore what we know about right vs. wrong and smart vs. foolish. We forget how we’d feel in a customer’s shoes if a bank froze our accounts, if a telecom company sent a nasty letter, or if a call-centre transferred us five times. Before long, most of us become not only numb, but complicit in crimes of corporate nonsense, even when they lead to frustrated customers, poor morale, lost revenue, and stifled innovation.
What has happened to common sense? And how can we get it back? Companies, it seems, have become so entangled in their own internal issues, and further beset by reams of invisible red tape, that they’ve lost sight of their core purpose. Inevitably, they pay the price.